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The
official website of Lexington, MA-headquartered game developer Cecropia
Inc. handily explains of the company's name: "A Cecropia is
North American's largest moth, with a wingspan of 5 to 6 inches…
because a Cecropia moth is colorful as well as large, when you do
see one for the first time, you will remember it forever!"

It's
a striking name for an intriguing game developer, formed by ex-Papyrus
Design Group co-founder Omar Khudari, and most recently in the news
because of the opening of Cecropia's animation and production studio
in Orlando, Florida. This 20-person Orlando studio is staffed by
2D animation industry veterans, many formerly employed at Walt Disney
Feature Animation's recently closed Florida animation studio, and
who work in collaboration with Cecropia's gaming staff and engineers
in the company's Boston headquarters.

So,
from co-founding Papyrus, best-known for the PC racing game technology
behind Grand Prix Legends and the NASCAR Racing series,
to working with veteran Disney 2D animators on what the company
describes as "interactive films [based on original IP] that
allow players to act in the role of animated characters and control
their behavior, expressions and reactions to other characters"
is quite a range. How do you get to here from there, and what were
Cecropia's plans for the very non-digital stylings of the Disney
2D animators, in a world where even Disney is abandoning its 2D
animation in favor of Pixar's CG sophistry? We talked to Cecropia
founder and creative director Omar Khudari, alongside president
and CEO Ann-Marie Bland, to find out.

Cecropia's
Florida office

Firstly,
Khudari explains the genesis of Cecropia: "The company was
founded in 2001. It basically grew out of an old idea I had had
many years for how to approach the problem of creating a videogame
that appeals to a broader audience than the standard core of the
videogame market. Our first step was to create an authoring system;
a piece of technology; a tool that we could use to build a prototype
with, and our second step was to build a prototype, an example of
the look and feel, or what the interactivity of such a product might
be. And that prototype was finished at the beginning of 2003."

He
continues: "Then I sort of had to make a decision when that
project came to an end, whether (or not) to move forward and to
turn it into a product. So I decided to move forward because I think
it's a very promising example of how this idea actually could work.
And that's when Ann-Marie [Bland, former Hasbro Interactive/Atari
manager] came onboard, and started building the development team
and the necessary trappings of a company around it, to create a
product and bring it to market."

But
the first thing people are likely to focus on when seeing the in-progress
artwork for the game is the relatively 'old-fashioned', but good-looking
2D drawn approach to the art style. Khudari explains just how far
the company went along this road: "All the artwork in the game
is hand drawn animation, there are no computer generated images.
It's something we could've done with CGI, just as animated films
are being done in CGI, or less and less in 2D. But we chose the
hand-drawn look because what's important to us is the personality
of the characters; the emotions, and something that's called in
the industry, which we didn't know before we started this project,
personality animation. Personality animation is the kind of animation
where you can tell what's going on in the character's head from
their facial expression and their body language and that kind of
thing. You can really read their emotions from the artwork. When
we started this project, and we continue to feel this way, that
the very bleeding edge of CGI is only just starting to approach
what 2D animators have been doing for decades, in terms of personality
animation. So we're using 2D animation, because that's what does
personality animation the best."

Production
still of a yet-unnamed Cecropia title.

Ann-Marie
Bland expands on this idea, noting: "I don't know if you've
seen any of the reviews of [Robert Zemeckis-directed CG movie] Polar
Express, but they talk a lot about the characters, and how life-like
they are, but they look like there's nothing between the ears. Their
eyes look dead. These characters, even though the technology is
so advanced, the characters themselves don't really act, or emote,
or feel very realistic."

But
how does traditional 2D animation really fit into today's gaming
market? Khudari admits it may not, but is quite happy that it doesn't,
explaining: "Well again, our raison d'etre is to try to broaden
the market, to expand it beyond what is a very healthy and growing
business still. That is the core of the market. The way I would
put it is that it goes beyond what is appealing to the core of the
market. It goes into a region that may appeal to an entirely different
kind of person." He also points out that Disney's ditching
of much of its 2D animation may not be a death knell for that medium:
"You know, it's a cyclical business. Animation has died more
than once before. As a matter of fact, when Walt Disney did Snow
White, animation was considered to be dead, and that was the
era of animated characters that had rubbery hose-like arms. And
it was reborn when Disney did Snow White, and it died again
later, subsequently, and was reborn with the Lion King, so
it's died and been reborn a number of times. One of the most important
things about the appeal of any animated feature film is the story.
And a lot of people say, and I tend to agree, that recently the
computer generated leaders have done a much better job of developing
appealing stories. So it's not just about the look."

Ultimately
on the quest for personality in animation, Khudari suggests, "There's
a woman at MIT who teamed up with a make-up artist to create a robot,
and they chose a very non-human looking design for the robot because
of this very issue. Something that looked human would be perceived
as creepy, whereas something that looked like a creature could be
more appealing. That's a problem that the Polar Express had.
Now, different teams are doing different types of work in CGI, and
some of the teams are doing really awesome jobs at the personality
animation, and they're really getting there, but again, that is
the bleeding edge, it's the state of the art, and so rather than
bleed along with them, we chose to rely on the tried and true."

Another
possible risk and benefit for Cecropia is its decision to go with
an original IP for this 'mass market'-aimed title. Khudari explains
this move: "There are a lot of reasons. For one thing, if
we develop our own IP that has some potential to have some value
beyond the initial product, that it gets shipped with, obviously
if you can build your own IP, from a business standpoint, it's preferable.
And it may or may not be more expensive or cheaper. IP can be very
difficult to acquire. And it can be expensive to develop. It's certainly
risky to develop it yourself, but it's a risk we're willing to take.
But there's another reason too, which is that the structure of our
product, while it's related to a film, the story that we've developed
was developed hand in hand with the interactivity, and it's a little
more difficult to apply interactivity to a pre-existing story."

But
in order to understand the company, you need
to grok the idea. Cecropia is not yet showing a playable demo or
even specifying a target platform for their work, and Khudari is
helpful, but still somewhat elusive in defining the concept behind
Cecropia's games: "In general, it is an approach to synthesizing
storytelling with videogames. Which is in itself nothing new at
all. Something that has been tried a lot of different ways and with
varying degrees of success."

He
attempts to be a little more specific: "Remember our overarching
goal is to appeal to a broader audience than the typical videogame
audience, and we identify as one of the problems of the appeal of
videogames with this audience is just how daunting they are. A normal
person, we use that word, a normal person, I mean you hand them
say a PlayStation controller or an Xbox controller, and it's the
controller itself that freaks them out. They're just not interested
in doing something that requires them to manipulate this very complex
thing. It makes the game seem complex, and it's just not something
that's appealing to most people."

"So
one of our principles is that is has to be very simple, which we
translate as 'accessible'. We take as our inspiration the first
commercial videogame; Pong, which had a very simple controller.
It was a game that anyone could walk up to, and feel like just by
looking at it and seeing what happens on the screen, what the controllers
look like et cetera, that this was something that they might be
able to do."

"So
that's principle number one. Principle number two, we are taking
the approach, and this is just our choice, of trying to synthesize
storytelling and gaming. Principle number two is: as much as possible,
we want the stories to be the kinds of stories that appeal to mass-market
audiences, and we want as much as possible for the action of the
games, or the game part of the product to be central and germane
to the story. So to me if you take those two things together, the
interesting kinds of stories that the mass-market is interested
in are stories about characters, about relationships, about people.
And if you're going to have the action of the game be central and
germane to that kind of story, the action of the game has to be
about characters, relationships, emotions, people and that kind
of thing."

Model
sheet of a yet-unnamed Cecropia title.

But
is the game about relationships, or is there action? Khudari explains:
"There's a little bit of action, just as there's action in
a lot of films. What we're trying to do is make an experience that's
as much, in terms of entertainment, like a film as possible. It's
like interactive film. We don't like to call it that because a lot
of people have called what they're doing interactive film, and our
fear is to be confused with those other things."

"That
kind of entertainment is what we're shooting for. So we want to
make it as much as possible like watching a movie, in terms of the
storytelling experience. So you know, our challenge is, how do you
make that interactive, how do you interact with the interesting
parts of the movies, which isn't always action. It's not always
physical action. Sometimes it is, but for the most part, the broadest
mass-market movies are about characters, and their relationships
and their emotions."

Oddly,
the art released so far for Cecropia's game end up reminding some observers
of classic LucasArts-style adventure gaming. Khudari is keen to
point out the differences, however. He expounds: "We've got
a lot of similarities with a lot of different things. The structure
of our games is not the structure of an adventure game. An adventure
game, broadly speaking, is a game about an environment you explore,
whether it's a physical environment or a logical environment, and
there's a network of places that you can go, and you have some control
over what direction you want to go, and initially it's limited by
gates, essentially, and those gates get opened by unlocking puzzles,
typically logical puzzles, and in that sense our game is not an
adventure game. It doesn't have that structure. Our structure has
much more in common with Donkey Kong than it does with that.
It's much more like an action game, where you are in direct control
over a character, immediate control over a character, so you're
not making choices from a menu, taking objects from one place to
another, you're not solving logical puzzles. You are controlling
the actions of a character, controlling it directly with the interface."

What
about competitors? There must be some game, series, or genre that's
in some kind of more direct competition with Cecropia's products,
surely? Khudari is even somewhat guarded on this, arguing: "Ann-Marie
is just reminding me that our competition is any form of entertainment
that is competing for entertainment dollars, but in term of competitors
who are taking an approach that is similar to ours, very closely,
not really."

How
about a target market for a product such as this? Well, Khudari
has an answer: "Basically, [we're targeting] the film audience.
We've been looking at a lot of Chaplin, a lot of old movies, we're
movie buffs here, and we're definitely trying to make a film-like
experience."

Ann-Marie
Bland continues: "If you went into a movie theatre today, and
surveyed everyone that came into that theatre about whether they'd
played a game, not purchased a game, but actually played a game
themselves, I don't know what the ratio would be, but it would definitely
be more that people had not played a game. And yet they still love
good story, they love characters, and that's the audience that we
can appeal to."

So
it seems that Cecropia, like the moth it's named after, is flitting
along a singular, if guarded and oblique path - the company has not yet
officially announced a publisher for its launch title, but indicate it
will be released during 2005. And when you read Cecropia's site in a
little more detail, you'll see another reason for the company's name.

Specifically,
it reads: "In the 1960's, there was a trendy gift shop in Harvard
Square, Cambridge, named "Zecropia." It was owned by Margie
Born, a friend of Omar's family. To Omar, the name has always meant
'hip & exotic.'" Are Cecropia really finding the path to
the gaming mass market in retro craftsmanship, like the '60s gift
shop the company was named after? They're certainly taking a different
route than many of the more obvious 3D, licensed titles out there
on the games market today, and that, at least, should be lauded.